Alan Rita — January 6, 2017 Success in social media marketing is all about forging meaningful connections with your audience. To do this, you should stop seeing social media networks merely as content distribution channels. You also need to listen to what users are saying, understand their pain points, and determine which content type matches their preferences.
Remember that giving your audience a voice is a key step in developing a solid social media strategy. Here’s an infographic of the most effective social media tactics and how listening to your audience can help your brand grow:
If you want to establish your brand as an authority, you need to determine your audience’s interests and invest in one-to-one relationships. You can win their approval by engaging in real-time interactions through chat and comments. If possible, draw out useful insights using surveys and polls.
Listening for Brand Mentions
To grow your sphere of influence in social media, you need to be vigilant whenever your brand gets mentioned. Apart from users who share their thoughts on your brand, mentions may also come from competitors who spread misinformation or potential buyers who make serious enquiries.
Whoever it’s from, you need to respond to brand mentions as quickly as possible. People out there are talking about your brand, and below are the tools that will help you listen:
1. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management platform that comes with monitoring and engagement optimization features. By linking your Twitter account, you can immediately get notifications whenever someone mentions you or your business name.
To monitor conversations in other networks, go to your dashboard and click on Add.
Currently, you can link your accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, and Google Analytics. Adding all your accounts to Sprout Social is a great way to aggregate notifications and streamline your monitoring efforts.
2. Tailwind
Tailwind is a social media management platform similar to Sprout Social that’s best used for Pinterest. It provides a quick overview of your account’s performance in terms of follower count, engagement rate, likes, repins, and so on.
One of Tailwind’s core features is the domain monitoring tool that allows you to track what people are pinning from your site. This will help you identify the type of visual content that piques the interest of your Pinterest followers. You can also sync your account with Google Analytics to obtain referral traffic insights.
3. Mention
Mention lets you choose if you want to monitor your brand, a competitor, or anything else via keyword. It has extensive tracking features that allow you to prioritize activities on your website, social media profiles, review sites, and all pages that link to them.
For historical listening data, go to Dashboards > Listening. Here, you can find interactive charts and lists that will help you gain a deeper understanding on your audience.
4. Picbear
Picbear not only helps you monitor engagement in your Instagram account, it also allows you to organize your followers into individual lists. This will allow you to sift through their posts and identify insights that truly matter.
With a little creativity, there are virtually limitless ways to use Picbear’s lists feature. For example, you can choose keep track of the ongoing interests of your past buyers to determine when it’s time cross-sell. You can also create separate lists for customers and non-buyers when holding an Instagram hashtag contest so you’ll know which entries to prioritize.
5. Awario
The main reason why Awario deserves to be on this list is because it independently crawls billions of web pages daily rather than relying on a data provider. It can help you spot important conversations about your brand in real-time so you can join in and connect with the online audience.
Awario lets you track anything – from competitors to a person’s social media account. It can also help you gauge the performance of marketing campaigns by analyzing the interactions they generate worldwide.
Final Thoughts
Listening to your audience in social media isn’t supposed to be difficult. After all, networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are meant for two-way communication, which is why they have integrated analytics features. You can learn about those features as well as how to use them in this post. Good luck!
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